by Don Winslow
“The two of you?”
Nicholai nodded again.
“Mmmph.”
“How did they find us here?” Nicholai asked.
“De Lhandes gave in, under torture.”
“Is he dead?”
“He’ll recover,” Bay answered.
“That’s good,” Nicholai answered. He didn’t begrudge his friend the betrayal under torture. Bay shouted for his men to hurry.
“We don’t have much time,” he explained. “They’ll be coming with more men. Getting you on the freighter is out now. Police and soldiers are checking every boat. They’re all over the harbor. Maybe we can get her on board, but not you.”
“I won’t leave without him,” Solange said.
“Where are we going?” Nicholai asked.
“Up the river,” Bay said, “into the delta. Deliver the guns to the Viet Minh and then find a way to get you out of the country. It might take some time.”
“We have time,” Nicholai said.
But he wasn’t entirely sure.
158
“ROCKET LAUNCHERS?” Diamond asked.
Signavi confirmed that rockets had sunk two boatloads of his men and sent them plunging into the Swamp of the Assassins.
God damn Nicholai Hel to a fiery death of his own, Diamond thought.
And God damn that traitor Haverford, who had to have had a hand in this.
“Do you know where he might be headed?” Signavi asked.
“He’s taking them to the Viet Minh,” Diamond said. “Guibert is a Chinese agent.”
“You told me he was an American narcotics agent.”
“Grow up,” Diamond said. “I lied.”
Either way the man had to be found and killed. Signavi took command of the military operation to sweep the delta and find Guibert and the weapons. A shipment of those weapons to the Viet Minh could change the course of the war.
“I’m going with you,” Diamond said.
He hated battles, but this was his best chance to kill Nicholai Hel.
159
HAVERFORD LOOKED at De Lhandes in the hospital bed.
“Who did this to you?” he asked.
“One of yours,” De Lhandes murmured through the painkilling drugs. “That’s why I asked to see you. I’m hoping you’re better than that.”
He told Haverford about giving up “Michel” and Solange’s whereabouts, then fell back into unconsciousness.
Haverford left the hospital in a cold white rage.
He went back to his office, checked out a service.45, and went hunting for Diamond.
160
THEY MADE IT safely up the river, navigating without running lights past naval patrols, hiding in channels, mangrove swamps, and stands of bamboo. Then they took a tiny tributary, little more than a stream, north through the swamp until they came out on the Dengnai River south of Saigon. Safely crossing the stream, they landed near a small village, where the people helped them transfer the cargo to a canvas-covered truck.
“What’s the name of this place?” Nicholai asked.
“Binh Xuyen.” Bay Vien chuckled. “We’re pretty safe here.”
They took some tea and rice with pickled vegetables, then got into the truck and drove the roadway inland, then left the truck and the main road and set off on foot. Daylight found them carrying the crates along dikes built above the rice paddies, steaming now in the cloying humidity that came just before the monsoon season.
Nicholai and Solange, dressed unconvincingly in the black shirt and trousers and conical hats of Vietnamese farmers, walked in the center of the small column — just enough Binh Xuyen to carry the load, a handful of armed guards, with Bay Vien in the lead. It was treacherous country, flat and open, observable by French aerial surveillance, vulnerable to the watchtowers and blockhouses that punctuated the landscape.
It was too risky, so they decided to abandon the dikes for the low rice paddies. Trudging through sometimes waist-high water was exhausting, progress was excruciatingly slow, and they had to stop and flatten themselves in the water every time they heard an airplane engine.
At this pace, Nicholai thought, they would never make it to the rendezvous with the Viet Minh. Solange, although stoic and uncomplaining, was clearly played out. Her calves and ankles were cut from blade grass, and her eyes showed a dunning fatigue.
“Are you all right?” he asked her.
“Splendid,” she said. “I’ve always enjoyed a stroll in the country.”
She pushed ahead of him.
Just before midday, Bay walked back to them.
“It’s too dangerous,” he said. “We have to stop for the day.”
Nicholai agreed, but asked, “Where?”
“There’s a bled just a kilometer or so from here,” Bay answered. “The villagers owe their allegiance to me.”
Nicholai knew exactly what that meant — if the people of the tiny hamlet betrayed them, the Binh Xuyen would come back and kill them all. It saddened him but he understood. Collective responsibility was an Asian tradition.
When they made it to the bled, Nicholai and Solange lay on the floor of a dark hut and tried to get a little sleep. There wasn’t much time to rest — they would move out again as soon as it was dark and hope to make some progress before the moon rose.
Solange fell asleep, but Nicholai lay awake, listening to the sound of airplanes circling above them. The tension in the village was palpable, especially when in the late afternoon he heard whispers that a Foreign Legion patrol was just a half kilometer away.
The village collectively held its breath.
Nicholai laid his hand on the warm metal of the machine pistol and waited. He wasn’t going to be captured — he had seen all he wanted of the interrogation room and the cell. If they took him, they would take him as a corpse.
Then he decided that was selfish. If it looks as if we’re going to be discovered, I will hand her the Ivanov bankbooks, then hold a gun on her and let them think we took her as a hostage. Then I will find a way to kill myself on the way to the prison. That resolved, Nicholai watched through the bottom slats as a Legion officer stood on the edge of the village and questioned its elder.
The man shrugged his shoulders and waved his finger in an arc, indicating that the foreigners could be anywhere, in any one of the dozens of villages nestled among the rice paddies. The young lieutenant looked at him skeptically.
Nicholai noticed that his finger had tightened on the trigger.
The lieutenant stared at the old man for a second, the old man stared back, and then the lieutenant ordered his men to move on. Nicholai lay back and looked at Solange sleeping. He drifted off himself, and when he woke up it was dusk. A few minutes later Bay came in, followed by a woman with bowls of rice and steamed fish. Solange woke up and they ate, then got ready to resume the march.
They walked the dikes now, shielded by the neat rows of mulberry trees. Staying in tight formation, they literally walked in each other’s footsteps and made reasonably good time until the moon rose and lit them. Then they stretched apart and moved by twos and threes, the scouts going ahead and whistling signals that it was safe for the next group to move.
The local militias were out, walking the dikes themselves, going from village to village. Several times, its patrols came within eyesight, and Nicholai’s party flattened themselves to the ground and belly-crawled, if they moved at all.
It was a deadly game of hide-and-seek in the moonlight, a match of stealth and wits. To Nicholai’s surprise, Solange was very good at it — she moved with a quicksilver grace and silence, and he laughed at himself when he remembered that she was not only Solange but the Cobra.
She is more experienced at this, he thought, than I am.
The night seemed to go forever, but they made about ten miles before the sky started to turn to the stony gray of predawn and they came to a long line of mulberries a half mile from a small hamlet.
Bay signaled them to lie and wait.
A few minutes later, Nicholai heard the single sharp whistle to come ahead and he quick-stepped in a slouch along the dike until he reached the relative safety of the tree line. There was a small clearing among the trees and there he saw Xue Xin.
161
“IT’S GOOD TO SEE YOU again,” Nicholai said.
“And you,” Xue Xin answered.
He looked so different now, in the light khaki jacket of a Viet Minh officer with a holstered pistol on his hip.
“You knew we’d meet again,” said Nicholai.
“I always knew it,” Xue Xin said. “I knew your true nature.”
More than I did, Nicholai thought.
His name wasn’t Xue Xin, of course, but Ai Quoc.
Nicholai saw it clearly now.
Quoc had controlled the operation and had counted on Nicholai to honor his deal with Colonel Yu.
“I knew,” Quoc continued, “that you would realize the truth and see things for what they are.”
“And now I want a life,” Nicholai said.
Quoc looked past him to see Solange and smiled. “We will do our best to get you out. It might require some patience on your part.”
“I have become the personification of patience.”
“Why do I have my doubts?”
“It must be your monklike wisdom,” Nicholai answered. “All that clipping of vines and deep breathing.”
The sky was turning a coral pink.
Quoc said, “We should be going.”
Nicholai walked up to Bay Vien. “Where are you going now?”
“Back to Saigon,” Bay answered, “to curse your name to the heavens for stealing my weapons and getting away with it.”
“Will they believe you?”
“Yes, or they’ll pretend to,” Bay said, “for a while longer, anyway. Then …”
He left it unfinished. It was obvious — no one knew the future, no man could say what his karma held in store for him.
“Goodbye,” Nicholai said. “I hope we see each other again in better times.”
“We will,” Bay answered.
Bay gathered his men and headed out.
“We need to go,” Quoc said. His soldiers, thirty-odd veterans, started to heft the crates on bamboo poles and were already walking north.
Quoc began to limp after them.
The airplane came out of the east.
162
WING GUNS BLAZING, strafing the tree line, it came in low and out of the sun.
Three Viet Minh went down like toy soldiers knocked off a shelf.
The shells splintered trees, spraying shards of wood like shrapnel.
Nicholai tackled Solange and lay on top of her. The ground shook under them from the vibrations of the low-flying plane.
“Go now!” Quoc yelled as the plane rose to come around for another strafing run.
Nicholai got to his feet and pulled Solange up behind him and, hand in hand, they ran for the next rice paddy, racing to get over the exposed dike before the plane completed its turn. Its wings shone in the rising sun as it banked, came back, and dove, a hawk on the hunt.
They made it over the dike, but two more Viet Minh behind them weren’t as lucky and were picked off easily. Nicholai and Solange slid down the slope into the muck of the rice paddy and plunged under the surface.
Holding her hand as he held his breath, Nicholai tried to listen for the now muted popping of the guns and the sound of the plane’s engines as it climbed again. When he heard a higher-pitched whine he pushed up, and together he and Solange sloshed across the rice paddy.
Looking around, Nicholai saw that Quoc had survived the last attack and was waving them toward a copse of trees on the far side of the paddy. Ahead of them, the men carrying one of the crates made it over the top of the dike and disappeared from sight. Another Viet Minh lay down on his back on the dike and started to fire his machine gun up at the plane, which was now coming in behind them.
Solange jerked him down, and again they held their breath and felt the rounds zip into the water around them. When they came back up, the plane was climbing in front of them. It waggled its wings and kept flying away, apparently out of ammunition or low on fuel.
Nicholai and Solange made it across the paddy, over the dike, and into the copse of trees, where the Viet Minh were regrouping. Wounded porters fell out as other men took their place. Loads were shifted, weapons exchanged. A soldier who was apparently a medic gave rudimentary aid with the scant supplies at hand. Other men were beyond help, and lay dead or dying.
Nicholai found a rifle and picked it up. Solange draped the sling of a burp gun around her neck. They walked to the far edge of the trees. In front of them stretched a long rectangle of tall sword grass bordered on the right and left by paddy dikes. Beyond the grass rose another stand of trees.
“We’ll be safe once we get there,” Quoc said, pointing to the trees.
“Why is that?” Nicholai asked.
“We disappear.”
Nicholai had no patience for Zen metaphysics. If Quoc, whether he was really a monk or not, thought they were going to meditate themselves into thin air, Nicholai wanted a more mundane plan. The plane had flown off, but the pilot had certainly radioed their position to the patrols that were thick on the ground.
It wouldn’t be long before troops arrived, and they would run out of neither bullets nor fuel. The French troops and native militia that had been crisscrossing the countryside would converge in a neat, organized pattern and surround them. The sheltering trees would become a death trap, unless Quoc had an actual plan for escape.
“Our motherland will swallow us,” Quoc said.
Poetic, Nicholai thought, but hardly practical.
Of course his mind went to a different metaphor, the go-kang, and he saw it all too clearly. Their little pool of black stones would soon stretch into a thin line and progress toward Quoc’s apparently magic trees, there to group into a pool again. The white stones — and there were many more of them — were even now gathering around them.
Go players had a term for such an isolated, surrounded group.
Dead stones.
And, Nicholai recognized, the flat go-kang surface had become an anachronism. The ancients never anticipated modern airpower, which literally added another dimension to the game. They couldn’t have imagined stones floating above the board, delivering death and destruction below.
Nor, he had to admit, was Go a model for battle. The go-kang was serene, quiet, perfect in its organization and form. The modern battlefield was chaotic, noisy, hellish in the anarchy of its blood, carnage, and agony.
Modernity, he thought, has destroyed so much.
He forced his mind back to the reality on the ground. Trap or no, the copse on the far side of the grass was a better position than the one they now occupied, its size created a larger defensive perimeter from which to make a last stand. He made it to be a little less than a half mile away, so it should take only minutes to reach.
But the sword grass would be a painful impediment, although doubtless narrow foot and game trails had been cut through the chest-high blades. The burden of the weapons, especially now that there were fewer porters, would slow them down further.
Perhaps …
No, Quoc would never think of abandoning the weapons, and when Nicholai looked at it honestly, neither would he.
They had come at too high a cost.
The quiet behind told him that the Viet Minh were ready to move out.
He turned and saw that they would leave their dead comrades. Everything useful had been removed from their bodies.
“It comes at a high cost, your freedom,” Nicholai said.
“For every enemy we kill,” Quoc answered, “they will kill ten of us. And in the end, it won’t matter.”
“Save, perhaps, to the ten.”
“The individual is nothing when compared to the whole,” Quoc answered.
Nicholai stared at him.
Seeing his true nature.
“You’re wrong,” he said.
“You will come to see.”
“I hope not,” Nicholai said. “I hope never.”
If each individual became only part of the machine, at the end of the day there would be only the machine. The inexorable, impersonal, grinding machinery of the modern. He turned away from Quoc, took Solange by the arm, and walked her away, out of hearing.
“I was thinking,” he said, “about the first meal we’ll have when we get to wherever we’re going.”
“Oh yes?” she said. “And what were you thinking?”
“You made a dish back in Tokyo …”
“I made a number of dishes back in Tokyo,” Solange said, her wide mouth opening into a smile.
Nothing can dim the light in those green eyes, he thought. “The coq au vin, perhaps.”
“Simple French country cooking.”
“Simplicity sounds wonderful,” Nicholai said. “With what wine, then?”
She speculated on a number of choices, narrowing it down to a handful and then finding it impossible to choose. Then they discussed which vegetables they would have as side dishes, how they should be prepared, and then which dessert would be best, a tarte tatin or perhaps a marquise au chocolat.
“Should we invite De Lhandes?” Nicholai asked.
“Yes, of course,” Solange answered, “but he must leave straight after coffee so we can make love.”
“Out he goes, then.”
She kissed him, long and lovingly.
163
THEY WERE ONLY fifty yards into the sword grass when the shooting started.
Turning to his left, Nicholai saw the line of Legionnaires come onto the dike, and to the far right of the troops he thought he saw a soldier with a vermilion beret directing their fire.
Signavi.
Nicholai lifted his rifle to his shoulder and returned fire, shooting to his left but moving ahead. The copse of trees was their only faint hope and they had to keep moving, for getting bogged down in the grass was certain death.
